Three times more people have been killed in wars in the last ninety years than in all the previous five hundred, and more than 90 per cent of casualties are civilians - half of them children.
Weapons are more expensive and more destructive; but resources for the things that people need (e.g. adequate health services and easy access to clean water) have been reduced. In some parts of the world scarce resources are used to buy weapons and maintain the armed forces while much of the population lives in appalling poverty.
Twentieth century technology, applied to the practice of war, has had a huge environmental impact. For example, millions of landmines: planted in war-torn countries across the world continue to kill and maim long after wars are over, they also deny agricultural use of the land. Clearing mines is laborious, dangerous, and 30 times the cost of the weapon itself.
However it is the testing and manufacture of the nuclear bomb that has been responsible for the most profound and persistent environmental damage to life on earth. Nuclear waste is a global problem that won't go away, threatening environmental disaster on a vast scale: toxic chemicals which accompany all weapon production have travelled round the globe in the atmosphere and ocean currents; as well as water and air, they harm earth, plants, livestock and wildlife and cause disease and death in humans.
The earth's environment is battered by war, its preparation, practice and aftermath. It is destroyed as an act of war; it is used as a weapon of war; and its destruction is expensive and sometimes irreversible.
- Information and examples of the impact of war on the environment from the Peace Pledge Union's web site
